My wife is reading Barbarian Days, the memoirs of a now 60-year-old surfer. While reading it, she stopped dramatically and looked at me to say, “He says that if you really want to be able to surf completely naturally, you have to start by age 14.” She continued, “Wow, by age 14. Can you imagine that?” I have to admit that I wasn’t really ...read more

All parents want to help children develop to the best of their abilities, and it is no wonder that most parents are perplexed and confused when they think about their roles in children’s lives. Rearing a child from birth onward is complicated enough’ why add another layer of complexity? Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspecti ...read more

I'm a pussy cat dad, a long way from being a Tiger Dad, but I have amped up my discipline on piano lessons, keeping my kids at the keyboard for up to an hour. We've been using Mark-my-time to keep the kids on track for their time commitment. Unfortunately, it is a pretty poor quality digital timepiece, poorly constructed and worn out quickly. So wh ...read more

Looking for an interesting alternative to traditional birthday parties? DadLabs suggests hosting a kids birthday party at a teppanyaki Japanese restaurant, which can make for a memorable outing for your family.

As your child gets older, interaction with teachers is less common, sometimes only during a very brief 10-minute meeting two or three times a year. Parents are often startled to find this process is more like an assembly line that can devolve into an exchange of "Everything's fine. Keep up the good work," which might tell you absolutely nothing. To ...read more

I'm a late bloomer piano prodigy. I decided to learn piano at the same time as started to subject my then five year-old daughter to lessons. At nine, she already plays more easily than I do, but we have a great time playing the piano together, learning new music, and singing along. My direction to "go practice" sure has a lot more moral authority w ...read more

A study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine has found a link between parents who interact less with their children while watching television and delayed linguistic development in kids between 8 months and 16 months.
329 children between the ages of 2 months to 2 years were kept under observation by researchers at t ...read more

A dad on our forum related how he had made a video of his own son and baby to give to him for Father's Day. Isn't that about the best present you can get as a dad? These fatherhood years go by so quickly and all we all love to try to recapture the feelings we had through them. Videos made in iMovie or in Adobe's Video Editing suite for PC can be th ...read more

Jonathan Clements, in the Wall Street Journal today, had some useful reminders for moms and dads trying to teach their kids good money skills. We actually practice some of these on our eight-year old. Our friend, Harvey Beck at ActiveAllowance.com writes a lot in his blog about his money experiments on his two boys and finds that a lot of these str ...read more